My Body(4)

“I’ll read them the riot act,” she declared.





10.


I tried to gauge where my parents thought I belonged in the world of beauties. It seemed important to them both, especially to my mother, that their daughter be perceived as beautiful; they enjoyed telling friends about the way people approached me to model and, later, about my modeling successes once I signed with an agency in middle school. They thought of modeling as an opportunity they should pursue as responsible parents. “She can make a lot of money. Does she have headshots?” a woman once asked in the checkout line of our local grocery store. When we returned to my mother’s car in the strip mall’s parking lot, I burst into tears. “I don’t want headshots, Mama!” I’d understood the word to mean needles in the head.

Eventually, my parents found me an agent and began driving me to shoots and castings in Los Angeles the way my classmates’ parents drove them to local soccer tournaments. My father put my first modeling “comp” card (an index-sized card with my dimensions and modeling images, typically left with clients at castings) on the wall by his desk in the classroom where he taught. When I was in high school, my mother framed a 9?-by-11-inch black-and-white image of me from a photoshoot and placed it on the kitchen counter facing the front door, so that anyone coming in was immediately greeted by my pouty lips, bare legs, and teased hair. I was embarrassed by the picture and its location. After I’d moved out of the house, I convinced my mother to remove it. By that point, it had been there for several years. “You’re right,” she said. “It doesn’t represent you anymore. You’re more beautiful than that now.”





11.


Beauty was a way for me to be special. When I was special, I felt my parents’ love for me the most.





12.


The first casting my mother took me to was for a denim company that made expensive jeans I’d never owned. She called in a sub to teach her class so that she could drive me to Los Angeles, and I left school early, hopping into her VW Bug in the middle school’s parking lot to make the commute.

She sped on the freeway, her sunglasses on. “I asked your agent about your chances on this audition. She thought I meant your chances of ‘making it’! She said, ‘She definitely has a shot but it’s always tough to say.’” She glanced at the rearview mirror, her two hands on the steering wheel. “I meant your chances for this casting! Not for fame.” She shook her head. “I didn’t like that at all.” They were getting ahead of themselves, she explained.

Inside the casting office, we were met with a blast of cool air and floor-to-ceiling glass doors. White benches lined the room and screens hung on the wall indicating the rooms assigned to various auditions. I walked a few paces in front of my mother, wearing the inexpensive, stretchy version of the denim company’s classic jeans and chunky black boots, both newly purchased from Ross Dress 4 Less. In my heels I stood almost a foot taller than her.

We settled down on a bench and I felt my feet in my unfamiliar boots, the way the zippers cut into the inside of my foot. A freckled boy with wild, naturally highlighted curly hair sat a few feet away from us.

“Emily?” A young woman held a clipboard to her face and then scanned the benches. I stood up.

“Flip your hair,” my mother whispered. I swung my head forward and felt the blood rush into my face, my hair surrounding me. I came back up, my hair falling to either side of my face. I could feel my mother’s eyes on the back of my head as I disappeared into the casting room.

On the car ride home, I rested my head in my hand and stared out the window. The sun hit my cheek as the freeway flew by.

“That boy looked at you when you stood up and flipped your hair,” my mother said. “He was watching you.”

What did he see? I wondered.





13.


My mother liked to recount stories about men noticing me from the time I was twelve (“I’ll never forget the look on his face as you walked past him! He stopped dead in his tracks and his mouth fell open!”). But she also believed that men’s understanding of beauty was limited and unrefined.

“Marilyn Monroe was never really beautiful,” she’d say to me, when my father would make an approving face at mention of her.

She made distinctions; there were women whom men found appealing and then there were true beauties. “I don’t get Jennifer Lopez,” she’d say, wrinkling her nose. “I guess men like her.” I learned over time that “men liked her” ranked far below “beautiful” but was decidedly preferable to not being mentioned at all. She could be quite condescending when speaking about such women: “She’s cute,” she’d say, smiling sweetly, a subtle trace of pity in her tone. When we’d watch a film featuring a young female actor, my mother would almost always remark on her looks: “I mean, she’s not a beauty.” She also did this with my friends, casually assessing their appearance as we shopped. “She’s certainly not pretty, but she does have a nice figure,” she’d proclaim as she inspected California avocados for their ripeness.





14.


After I left home, my parents made a habit of posting professional pictures of me on their Facebook pages. My mother responded to each comment from her friends with a “Thank you so much, Suzy!” or “We are so proud of her, Karen.” My father responded to his friends, too, but instead of saying thank you, he liked to joke: “She has my heart and soul and that’s about it, Dan.” I read his comment and thought of the time he told me that I’d inherited his nose.